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Disney-Land aspects of it to fit within the Disney brand. Main Street, USA is one of these aspects of Disneyland that had been victim to this censorship.
1.3 Main Street Fig. 7
Fig. 9
Figure 7 shows the old American town that inspired Walt Disney to create his Main Street, to which the first set of concept drawings by the Imagineers can be seen in figure 8. This Image shows us that from the beginning, the street was meant to be a mainly pedestrian walkway. Figure 9 shows the Disney version of this street, which went of to be called Main Street, USA.
Fig. 8
Beth Dunlop describes the street in its very essence, as a series of “stage-crafted façades in front of continuously connected shops.”[10] This street as Walt sought to describe it, is a “fantasy version of a turnof-the-century-small-town Main Street,”[11] mimicking old American towns post-war as shown in Figures 7-9. However, upon closer inspection the one element missing from the real town to Disney’s Main Street, is the all the stereotypic bad, undesirable features of a real street. The dark alleys, the dirt, the garbage and the homelessness, to which Disney’s Main Street resembling another Disneyfied story, filtered out of all evil to suit the brand’s narrative shown in television as shown in figures 10-13. The architecture first exposed to the visitors is this street, which hence became a very significant statement to Disneyland, as it fed directly to the fantasy it portrayed in television. Richard Francaviglia, “believes that Disney’s Main Street is one of the most successful pedestrian environments in the world, [calling it] a remarkable effective design for reinforcing experiences, heightening anticipation, and moving traffic,”[12] as the fantasy is developed on screen is emphasised on this street. So successful was the street that Disney got “letters from Nebraska or Iowa wanting to redo their Main Street”[13] just like the Disney version. The street was not only a threshold getting people from one part of the park to another, but an experience heightened by the architecture around it. 10 Dunlop, B. (1996) Building a dream. New York: Disney Editions. 11 Ibid 12 Ibid 13 Ibid
Because of the constraints of this essay, I cannot explore the significance of Main Street to the external real world, as the focus here is in the translation of the televised fantasy realised in Disneyland, and in this case, the exclusion of the harmful, the unwanted and the evil in the real world. I will speak again about Main Street in the next chapter, highlighting a different aspect realised from this street on the Disney fantasy.